Endings and Beginnings

Wow. Has it been seven years already?

I remember when Dean Alfar made the announcement of the table of contents for the first volume of the Philippine Speculative Fiction collection. And now it's the other husband-and-wife team of Kate and Alex Osias who recently made their announcement of the 7th volume of PSF of those who made it for this year.

To wit, PSF7's table of contents has the following stories and writers:

1. All That We May See by Kenneth Yu
2. All the Best of Dark and Bright by Isabel Yap
3. Bastard Sword by Nikki Alfar
4. Chasers by Chris Mariano
5. East of the Sun by Dean Francis Alfar
6. Faith in Fiction by James Constantino Bautista
7. Mother of Monsters by Philip Corpuz
8. Never Land by Mo Francisco
9. Oblation by Paolo Chikiamco
10. Pet by Kristine Ong Muslim
11. Sarsarita Time by Melissa Sipin
12. The Call of the Chained God by Dariel Quiogue
13. The Changes by Benito Vergara
14. The Commute to Paradiso by Charles Tan
15. The Day Nostalgia Swept Over a Town by F. Jordan Carnice
16. Dragon's Orb by Vincent Michael Simbulan
17. The Likeness of God by Crystal Koo
18. The Little Things the Datu Did by Andrew Drilon
19. The Love Spell by Julian dela Cerna
20. The Nature of Apocalypse by Joseph Anthony Montecillo
21. The Scrap Collectors by Arlynn Despi
22. username: tanglaw by Eliza Victoria
23. What the Body Remembers by Tin Lao
24. What You See by Ian Rosales Casocot

Congratulations to those who made it to the roster! I wish I could have been part of this collection also but alas, I wasn't able to submit last year. Will try for this year. Hopefully, unless the world ends.

Of course there are endings (of the solicitation-open reading type) and endings (like the Apocalypse). That's why publishing maverick Adam David has raised a call for submissions because it's 2012 and if the Mayans are to believed, the curtain's ready to drop on this show we call The World:

This is a call for submissions for THURSDAY NEVER LOOKING BACK, an electronic anthology that seeks to gather, process, and perform these various end-of-the-world scenarios – and hopefully more (and more imaginative or realistic) and hopefully beyond – in the endlessly inventive media of language, line, and light: send in your essays, fictions, poetry, songs, komix, doodles, photographs, videos, and everything else in between to 12202012antho@gmail.com. Texts should be sent as RTFs, PDFs if needing special design conceits; images should be sent as JPGs or GIFs; audio files as links to MP3 downloads; and videos as links to YouTube or whatever file sharing service is convenient for you. In any language intelligible by contemporary civilisation! Or actually, even not!

The deadline for the first wave of submissions is April 30, 2012, with a mid-year soft launch of July 16, 2012, which is also when the call for the second wave of submissions will commence for the eventual hard launch on December 20, 2012, when we will bid the end of the thirteenth b’ak’tun of the fourth world goodbye and say hi to the first of the fifth. A website will host the anthology as hypertext, with eBook formats for the Kindle, iPad, and Android a distinct possibility. This is the anthology for the end of the world as we know it! Be there or be spared!

So why not submit something before it all ends, right? You've got nothing to lose.